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An Evaluation of World Bank and International Finance Corporation Engagement for Gender Equality over the Past 10 Years

Chapter 4 | Conclusions and Recommendations

Gender equality has been a high-level commitment of the Bank Group for at least two decades. The recently approved 2024–30 gender strategy sets a bold goal for the institution—“consistent with the [Bank Group’s] new mission, it expresses the ambition to accelerate gender equality to end poverty on a livable planet” (World Bank Group 2024, 8). The FY16–23 gender strategy previously committed to “maximize the impact of [Bank Group] efforts to close gaps in key development outcomes between men and women, especially the poorest, as they access socioeconomic opportunities, as well as to steer [Bank Group] activities and their monitoring toward measurable results” (World Bank Group 2015, 12). Gender has been an IDA special theme since the 16th Replenishment of IDA that channeled financial resources to address gender inequalities in IDA countries.

This evaluation finds that progress has happened at the level of engagement but more in breadth (quantity) than depth (quality) and more in design than in implementation, with limited evidence of results. The evaluation recognizes good progress in the Bank Group’s engagement for gender equality since 2012—the starting point for this evaluation. The evaluation finds that the proportion of projects and activities that address gender inequalities has improved; the commitment by management at all levels has increased; the staff has embraced the mandate, with a larger share of World Bank and IFC staff now integrating activities in projects to address gender inequalities; and the amount of knowledge supporting operations has expanded and led to better design. More country strategies discuss gender inequalities, and more DPOs focus on policies to address them. At the same time, progress has been made more in quantity rather than quality—projects with low gender relevance have increased, but operations including gender-transformative elements remain few. In addition, inadequate attention to implementation and an overly narrow focus on women’s and girls’ access to resources and services undermine the achievement of gender equality results. Moreover, the current model of engagement for gender equality is not able to show results systematically through the Bank Group’s monitoring and evaluation system.

To realize its ambition, the Bank Group needs to rethink how it operationalizes its strategy to advance gender equality strategy. This report has highlighted challenges that have been found in other evaluations but have not been successfully addressed so far; thus, a new approach is needed.

Enhancing Country Engagement for Gender Equality

The Bank Group’s country engagement for gender equality is still fragmented and is not based on an effective prioritization and coordination of activities—it must become more systematic and strategic. The 2024–30 gender strategy commits the Bank Group to adopt a country-driven approach—that is, to approach gender equality more coherently and strategically in its country engagement. This was also the key modality of engagement for gender equality according to the FY16–23 gender strategy. This evaluation finds that most country strategies’ gender priorities align well with gender statistics, and the gender priorities were identified using robust diagnostics, especially from SCDs.1 Different instruments of support—DPOs, IPFs, Programs-for-Results, ASAs, and IFC advisory and investment projects—also often align with the gender priorities identified by the country strategy. However, a limited number of country strategies use knowledge of what works to articulate operational strategies for select portfolio activities to respond to gender priorities. As highlighted by IEG’s evaluation of gender inequalities in FCV, addressing gender inequalities requires going to their root causes (World Bank 2023a), which is impossible for an individual project to achieve, especially at scale. This requires coordinating the relevant lending instruments and ASAs of the country portfolio and establishing collaborations with other development partners and local stakeholders based on each one’s comparative advantage.

The country engagement approach for gender equality does not work as intended because of misaligned incentives at the country level and insufficient decentralization of capacities and resources. The gender tag and the gender flag incentivize a project-by-project approach (which contributes to fragmentation). Similarly, tools, guidelines, and resource allocation are overwhelmingly aimed at individual projects. Collaboration is essential for achieving country-level outcomes, but incentives are lacking to foster it across operational teams and with stakeholders in the country. Thus, internal coordination between GPs and industries and between GPs and IFC and coordination and partnerships with other development partners do not happen frequently enough. There are also no accountability mechanisms for the Country Management Unit to implement the country-driven approach for gender equality. Best practices in the country-driven approach depend on committed country directors and country managers supported by gender champions or gender experts. The evaluation observes that country engagement works when there are decentralized skills and resources—expert TTLs acting as champions and advisers, skilled gender focal points, and gender platforms or other gender coordination mechanisms—that facilitate cross-sectoral work, adapt gender support to the specific context, orient policy dialogue, coordinate with development partners, and support implementing partners to achieve gender outcomes.

A renewed system could be put in place to strengthen strategic country engagement for gender equality. First, country gender analytics need to go beyond identifying gender priorities to provide insights into how to best achieve change in the country context, including with respect to local institutions and political economy. This will likely entail enhancing gender diagnostics in core country analytics, while identifying knowledge priorities to support adaptive implementation. Second, country strategies should more effectively prioritize activities and expected results based on a deep understanding of local constraints and opportunities to advancing gender equality and define measurable indicators to track these results. Third, country engagements should better leverage World Bank and IFC collaboration and comparative advantage and strengthen collaboration with development partners, local stakeholders, and women’s organizations. Finally, country management teams should ensure adequate resources and focus on adaptive implementation, including regularly monitoring progress toward priority gender outcomes.

Focusing on Gender Outcomes

Advancing gender equality is a high-level goal that needs to be better defined and tracked at the corporate, project, and country levels. Beyond the gender tag and flag, there is no system to consolidate and report on results. There is no explicit agreement on which type of gender equality results is important to pursue and track and which indicators to use to measure them. The Bank Group does not have an articulated definition of which type of results the institution is achieving (and should achieve) in supporting countries to move toward gender equality and whether the Bank Group support is prompting change. This does not facilitate a consensus around gender equality goal(s). Key informants give varying definitions for results—as better processes, better designs, higher share of gender tags and gender flags, achievement of project targets, or decrease of specific gender inequalities in countries—and there is no system that codifies, monitors, and appropriately incentivizes results at all these levels.

Indicators rarely measure gender equality outcomes. At the project level, completion reports infrequently report on gender results, often because they rely on weak gender indicators and monitoring and evaluation methods. Many indicators measure outreach, assuming that it corresponds to outcomes achieved. On a positive note, the share of projects that measure only outreach has drastically decreased for the World Bank. Few projects measure women’s and girls’ empowerment or a reduction of gender inequalities. Indicator baselines are often zero, either because data are not available or because indicators measure only project outputs. Implementation Status and Results Reports rarely track gender-related processes and ongoing advancements of gender results. At the country level, there is no reporting of countrywide gender results. Performance and Learning Reviews and Completion and Learning Reviews report gender results in terms of project-focused results and activities.

Oversimplified theories of change that do not examine the root causes of gender inequalities also lead to limited evidence of results. Achieving gender equality requires that all three elements of the theory of change are fulfilled: more access to and control of resources, more conducive formal and informal institutions, and increased women’s and girls’ agency. Analysis of case study interventions indicates that most projects do not sufficiently consider the interconnections and complementarities among these three dimensions. For example, women’s access to finance may be a necessary but insufficient intervention for reducing gender inequalities in economic opportunities. Access to finance does not guarantee control and ownership for improved women’s empowerment. Most interventions also tend to target women as isolated individuals, overlooking men and boys and not considering the implication of strong gender power relations on women’s choices and empowerment opportunities. Similarly, projects overlook the influence of the ecosystems in which women and girls and men and boys are embedded, such as households, community and social networks, local governments, and religious and ethnic institutions. Beneficiaries are often oversimplified, with women frequently considered an undifferentiated group. In addition, the lack of consideration of intersectionality may result in widening inequalities among women because some interventions work only for specific social groups of women.

The evaluation’s findings present important implications for the implementation of the new Bank Group Corporate Scorecard indicators on gender equality. The new scorecard gender indicator measures the number of people directly benefiting from operations that intentionally seek to advance gender equality. This indicator intends to improve on the previous set of indicators, including sex-disaggregated indicators of Bank Group–supported results (the second tier) and percentages of gender-tagged projects capturing Bank Group performance (the third tier). The new indicator is (like the gender tag) defined only at design. Moreover, it counts populations receiving interventions, assuming they benefit from the support. The evaluation shows that good design does not guarantee achievement of gender outcomes, and the simple inclusion of beneficiaries in the project does not guarantee results. Rather, the reduction of gender inequalities hinges on all the conditions of the theory of change being fulfilled.

Capturing meaningful impacts on gender inequalities at the country level requires a stronger monitoring system of country strategies and portfolios that combines quantitative indicators and qualitative narratives. An improved country-level monitoring system of gender equality outcomes needs to overcome the culture of attribution and embrace the contributions of the Bank Group to country gender outcomes based on its comparative advantage in each country. Gender equality outcomes can be achieved only through coordination and collaboration with all relevant country actors. The new Bank Group Corporate Scorecard contemplates using narratives to capture the World Bank’s contribution to gender-relevant policy and law reforms (which requires providing country teams with capacity building, guidance, and tools to ensure harmonization and consolidation of reporting).

The quality of gender equality results is multifaceted and can be captured only by using multiple tools. As results are complex and multilayered, a single scorecard indicator, even well implemented, cannot track results and risks distorting incentives. To understand if the World Bank has contributed to addressing gender inequalities, it is essential to monitor both process-related outputs (attributable to the World Bank) and country-level outcomes the World Bank has contributed to, in collaboration with relevant stakeholders and development partners. This requires using multiple monitoring and evaluation techniques. For example, although impact evaluations are an essential tool, they can assess only the impact of an individual component of a project and cannot disentangle the source of the impact. They are better at identifying short-term impacts and are not the right tool to inform on the combined impact of simultaneous and complex factors, including institutional settings and corporate mechanisms. The effort of the GILs to increasingly engage with operational teams to better understand what works using a more comprehensive suite of evaluation instruments contributes to improving measurement and learning and requires stronger and more regular support. More strategic collaboration of the GILs with country teams and gender experts in operations can enhance the operationalization of knowledge and strengthen the country-driven approach.

The Bank Group lacks a deliberate and tested strategy for scaling up sustainable impacts on gender equality. Both the FY16–23 and 2024–30 gender strategies aim to support results at scale. Thus far, the Bank Group has achieved large-scale gender results by supporting the strengthening of sector systems at the national level. However, the FY16–23 gender strategy relied on identifying replicable interventions found to work through impact evaluations. Although this knowledge is an important contribution, replication does not amount to scalability at the country level. Expanding project areas and beneficiaries to attain scale does not necessarily achieve sustainable outcomes beyond the project’s duration. Sustainable results require adaptation to the local context, stronger local capacity, and an enabling environment. They require mobilizing financial and human resources, institution strengthening, and opportunistic support to existing processes to ensure that results are owned and long-lasting.

Realigning Incentives, Resources, and Accountability

The incentives and resources devoted to support gender equality do not match the level of ambition of the Bank Group. The incentives caused efforts to try to do too much at the same time with respect to the feasibility of reducing gender inequalities in every project. The gender tag successfully enforces a minimum quality standard—which is an important accomplishment. However, the gender tag is unable to incentivize, identify, and track gender-transformative projects or country engagements, and it focuses only on design and not on implementation. This hinders the allocation of adequate resources for design, implementation, monitoring, and assessment of impact. The FY16–23 gender strategy meant to replace nonselective mainstreaming with strategic mainstreaming, but this intent was not fulfilled. IFC has been more focused and strategic in this area, but the pressure to use the gender flag in more projects risks diluting quality unless additional resources are allocated to meet higher targets for the flag and focus on gender-transformative projects. Consequently, effective strategies for replication and scaling up of successful interventions remain elusive.

Insufficient human and budgetary resources are allocated to support implementation at the country level. First, both this evaluation and Addressing Gender Inequalities in Countries Affected by Fragility, Conflict, and Violence: An Evaluation of the World Bank Group’s Support (World Bank 2023a) underscore that the presence of gender expertise in a country office is critical to successful gender engagement because it enables support to operational teams and coordination with partners and stakeholders. Conversely, the lack of such expertise undermines the achievement of gender equality outcomes. Second, it is essential to build the skills and knowledge of staff in both leadership and operational positions for gender analytics, policy dialogues, and design and implementation of gender-transformative operations. Third, the gender architecture is not clearly defined, with overlapping roles, unclear lines of reporting and accountability, and unclear coordinating mechanisms. Finally, greater focus on implementation will require a shift of incentives and resources from design to implementation and more systematic tracking of implementation in the country portfolio.

Incentives, resource allocations, and structures in the gender architecture could be realigned to better support strategic country engagement and increase the focus on gender equality outcomes. Shifting to a more strategic and synergic focus on achieving gender outcomes will require a shift of incentives and resources (human and budgetary) toward supporting implementation, strengthening the gender skills and expertise of Bank Group staff, streamlining and duly financing the Bank Group gender architecture, and revising and complementing the current gender tag and gender flag system to increase the focus on more transformative engagements.

Recommendations

The Bank Group finds itself at a favorable junction as the implementation plan of the 2024–30 gender strategy is being prepared and the 21st Replenishment of IDA negotiations are about to begin. The conditions exist for a stronger and more impactful country-driven engagement for gender equality. The evaluation offers three recommendations to advance this goal. The three recommendations are for both the World Bank and IFC, and each institution will implement them according to its operating model.

Strengthening Country-Driven Engagement

Strengthen the country-driven engagement model for gender equality, with greater selectivity, prioritization, and coordination of the country portfolio activities supporting gender equality objectives and an increased focus on implementation. This could be accomplished by (i) ensuring that Bank Group core diagnostics and Country Gender Assessments not only analyze gender inequalities but also provide guidance on which gender inequalities to prioritize and key constraints to address; (ii) explicitly integrating those gender priorities in country strategies and setting up criteria and incentives to translate the country strategy gender priorities into expected results and activities, selected based on the World Bank and IFC comparative advantages and in collaboration with development partners and other key stakeholders, such as CSOs and women’s rights organizations; (iii) identifying the portfolio of activities required to achieve the prioritized goals in country strategy documents and ensuring reporting of progress toward relevant outcomes; and (iv) focusing financial and human resources on the selected gender priorities to ensure that the Bank Group portfolio addressing gender inequalities is effectively coordinated to leverage synergy across instruments, projects, and institutions.

Enhancing Capacity and Monitoring and Evaluation

Develop the capacity of World Bank and IFC monitoring and evaluation systems to track and account for complex gender results; incentivize the achievement of outcomes at the operational, country, and corporate levels; and regularly report on progress. This could be accomplished by (i) introducing a system to distinguish between activities of the World Bank and IFC that are gender sensitive (that reach the minimum standard) and those that aim to be gender transformative and have a strategic impact on gender equality in the countries; (ii) improving measurement of results using appropriate indicators—both quantitative and qualitative—to capture outputs attributable to the Bank Group and outcomes that the Bank Group contributes to; (iii) ensuring that project-level and country-level monitoring systems regularly report on gender-related results and processes during implementation of projects and country strategies; and (iv) establishing outcome-oriented indicators at the corporate level that go beyond outreach and processes to show progress in gender equality.

Redefining the Gender Architecture

Redefine the current Bank Group gender architecture to specify roles and responsibilities; avoid overlaps and replication of functions; strengthen underresourced tasks, especially implementation of gender-related activities and support to country engagement; improve capacities; and enforce accountability. This could be accomplished by (i) defining a streamlined structure to avoid overlaps and replications of tasks and to clarify roles and responsibilities, reporting lines, collaboration, and accountability mechanisms of gender human resources (the Gender Group, regional gender coordinators, GP and industry gender focal points and advisers, country gender focal points, gender platforms and other gender coordination mechanisms, GILs, and so on) and management at all levels and TTLs; (ii) strengthening the gender expertise of staff, managers, and TTLs through capacity building tailored to different functions, sectors, and contexts, including shadowing, on-the-job and peer-to-peer training, coaching, and other forms of learning; (iii) ensuring that gender experts with adequate seniority are available to support each country engagement, including through decentralizing gender skills to local offices, building local gender expertise, and avoiding overreliance on consultants; and (iv) ensuring that tasks are properly funded through the Bank Group budget, with trust funds strategically leveraged to support priority engagements.

  1. As the Systematic Country Diagnostic gets downscaled, the World Bank Group will need to guarantee that robust gender analysis continues to be timely channeled to the Country Partnership Framework.